The Change

While I did get a lot of compliments on the old design, I wanted to go in a more “professional” direction with the site. I’d love to know what you think in the comments!

Oh, and if you’re one of the like…5 RSS subscribers I have here, come on out of your RSS reader and take a look.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been a fan of hand-drawn-style designs lately. After seeing Keith’s hand-drawn icon set (previously linked) I thought I would contact him about making a minimal hand-drawn-style blog design for Leland.info. I think it turned out pretty nice.

By the way, Keith has also designed a number of themes for Theme Lab, including Cool Stripes, Photabulous, and Bravissimo (XHTML/CSS only).

Maybe if enough people like it, I could create a generic version of the theme for release. Love it or hate it? Let me know in the comments. It’s also a work in progress, you may see me adding/removing different things over time.

And yes, I know the social bookmarking icons below the posts don’t work. Do people actually use those anymore? Clicking social bookmarking icons, not the actual social bookmarking sites.

Download

The theme does require a few things to set up. Here’s a quick set of instructions below:

1. Download the .zip file from the fat download link above.
2. Extract the /simply-minimal/ folder and upload to your /wp-content/themes/ directory.
3. Activate the “Simply Minimal” theme under Appearance → Themes.
4. Once activated, create a page called “Home” and use the Homepage template.
5. Create another blank page called something like “Blog” or “News” for your posts page.
6. Go to Settings → Reading and set your Front page and Posts page.
7. Go to Appearance → Simply Minimal Options and fill in the settings.
8. Use the Optional Excerpt to control the excerpts displayed on the homepage.
9. Add widgets of your choice to the “Sidebar” and “404″ widget areas.

Yeah, I know the download link is on Theme Lab, but that’s only because my hosting account there has a ton of bandwidth. This should be considered an “as-is” theme by me, and thus I can’t offer any free support. This theme has threaded comments and it won’t work in anything below WordPress 2.7.

There aren’t any links in the footer or anything, but it would be appreciated if you left a link back to this page so other people can find the theme, as well as the free XHTML/CSS template and PSD template versions.

Hope you all like the theme. Let me know what you think in the comments here.

Less emphasis is being placed on the blog with more being placed on social networks such as Twitter, as evidenced by the homepage template. I also plan on releasing a portfolio here with some of my work. For the sidebars, I used a little widget goodness with some techiniques discussed in my article at Smashing Magazine: 5 Useful And Creative Ways To Use WordPress Widgets.

Finally, is this a WordPress theme you might be interested in? I’m not sure of the licensing of the template so I’d have to check with insicdesigns to see if it would be okay to release over at Theme Lab. The theme still needs some work, but I’m just trying to gauge interest here.

This wasn’t the only blog that I left dormant. My other (much more popular) blog, Theme Lab, was also void of any updates for several months. I recently revived it and picked up where I left off. I think I’m pretty lucky to have amassed such a loyal group of subscribers.

So anyway, here’s what I’ve done today to the blog here at Leland.info:

• Upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1
• Upgraded a number of plugins (pretty easy nowadays)
• Changed the theme from Monochromatic to this
• Added a nice widgetized footer

That’s about it. I may update this blog in the future, I may not. I don’t really know as I don’t keep track of it much.

• Word count on the write menu
• “Bubble” for outdated plugins

It was a relatively painless upgrade for this blog, especially since I don’t have that many plugins that I’d have to keep up with too.

It only took me a year and a half to actually make one, but better late than never! It has information on me, my websites, my profiles across the web, etc. Check it out!

Also, a few days ago was Theme Lab’s birthday. Can’t believe it’s already been a year since I’ve started that site. It’s grown into a very active site.